Retweet: Researchers show that as incomes go down the poor become less likely to support progressive policies

Thanks to the site Naked Capitalism for finding this one: researchers who studied survey questions from 1952 to 2006 found that when incomes begin to go down, the poor begin to become more conservative, less supportive of the types of policies that are designed to help them economically.

Physorg.com reported on the work of Peter Enns, assistant professor of government, and Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee and their paper which appeared in the October issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

“As inequality rose, the high- and low-income respondents on average become less supportive of spending on welfare,” Enns reported. “And this is not because low-income people are unaware of inequality; our results show they are more aware of it than most people.”